The personalisation of coaching - at the price of e-learning

When it comes to learning to be a better manager or leader, one size really doesn’t fit all. 

We all start from different places, don’t we? Not just in terms of experience but also in terms of who we are, what each one of us specifically needs to do to develop our competence and effectiveness. Most of us often have limited time and energy to devote to training and development, so it’s critical that we understand where to focus our efforts.

Let’s look at two colleagues

We’ll call them ‘Alice’ and ‘Ben’, they may sound familiar. Alice is great when it comes to driving results, but really needs to think about how to create empathy with her team. Her colleague Ben is great on empathy, but needs to learn to toughen up. When it comes to deciding what training they’d like to do, Ben chooses to spend his training energy learning more about empathy. He knows this is a strength for him and he wants to build it even further. Meanwhile, Alice avoids the subject of empathy altogether, as it feels difficult and uncomfortable. She focuses her efforts on doing courses in time management. In each case, their training energies are more or less wasted. They’ve become better at things they were already good at, whilst neglecting the areas that would have had a major impact on their organisations and the lives of the people around them. Alice and Ben need self-awareness to understand themselves and the impact that they have on others.